Design and Development of Ablation Laser Instrument for Robotic Surgery

This is a PhD research project in Electrical Engineering on Surgical Robotics. A Robotic Surgery Training System has been developed in our laboratory for researching robotic surgical procedures.

The system has the features of tele-manipulation of surgical instruments within a laparoscopy training box, 3D visualization of the training surgical environment within the box, and haptic feedback provision from the interaction of the instruments with objects and experimental surgical environment.

The first aim of this project is to further develop the control and instrumentation of this setup to closely replicate actual robotic surgical systems. This first aim involves robot control and design and implementation of mechatronic systems.

The second aim of this project is the design and development of a semi-automated robotic surgery instrument for ablation laser surgery to be used in robotic surgery.

We have successfully demonstrated the ablation laser technology for colonic epithelial laser ablation by means of picosecond laser pulses, on porcine intestine and cancerous mouse intestine.

This project will instrumentalize this cutting-edge technology in order to prove and demonstrate that it can be implemented with robotic surgery instruments, and can be used in robotic surgery in an easy and intuitive way for ablation of cancerous cells.